200 Women is a book and exhibition founded on original interviews and accompanying photographic portraits. This landmark project is the realisation of an epic global journey to find two hundred women with diverse backgrounds, and to ask them what really matters to them.

200 Women is a book and exhibition inspired by a belief that you can’t empower women without listening to their stories. Our subsequent idea was to persuade two hundred women in different parts of the world - whether they be rich or poor, black or white, educated or uneducated, famous or unknown - to sit or stand in front of a plain sheet of fabric and to be photographed and filmed while answering five fundamental questions.

Our goal was not to make a book about just successful and powerful women; those stories are important, but we wanted diversity, and above all, authenticity. Two hundred 'real women', with 'real stories'.

Embeth Davidtz

Embeth Davidtz was born in Lafayette in Indiana, USA. She obtained a master's degree from Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Davidtz has appeared in numerous films, including Matilda, Schindler's List, Mansfield Park, Bicentennial Man and Bridget Jones's Diary, and in television programmes that include Californication, Mad Men and Ray Donovan. She was diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer in 2013 and underwent chemotherapy, immunological treatment, lymph-node removal surgery and a mastectomy. Davidtz has been in remission since 2013.